Followers

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Meet the prominent legislators who think it's okay to throw Americans in jail forever without charges or trial.

Reuters

What everyone must understand is that American politics doesn't work the way you'd think it would. Most people presume that government officials would never willfully withhold penicillin from men with syphilis just to see what would happen if the disease went untreated. It seems unlikely that officers would coerce enlisted men into exposing themselves to debilitating nerve gas. Few expected that President Obama would preside over the persecution of an NSA whistle-blower, or presume the guilt of all military-aged males killed by U.S. drone strikes. But it all happened.

Really thinking about all that may make it easier to believe what I'm about to tell you.

It may seem
like imprisoning an American citizen without charges or trial
transgresses against the United States Constitution and basic norms of
Western justice dating back to the Magna Carta.

It may seem like reiterating the right to due process contained in the 5th Amendment would be uncontroversial.

It may seem
like a United States senator would be widely ridiculed for suggesting
that American citizens can be imprisoned indefinitely without chargers
or trial, and that if numerous U.S. senators took that position, the
press would treat the issue with at least as much urgency as "the fiscal
cliff" or the possibility of a new assault weapons bill or likely
nominees for Cabinet posts.

It may seem like the American
citizens who vocally fret about the importance of adhering to the text
of the Constitution would object as loudly as anyone to the prospect of
indefinite detention.

But it isn't so.

The casual news
consumer cannot rely on those seemingly reasonable heuristics to signal
that very old norms are giving way, that important protections are being
undermined, perhaps decisively.

We've lost the courage of our convictions -- we're that scared of terrorism (or of seeming soft on it).

News
junkies likely know that I'm alluding to a specific law that has passed
both the Senate and the House, and is presently in a conference
committee, where lawmakers reconcile the two versions. Observers once
worried that the law would permit the indefinite detention of American
citizens, or at least force them to rely on uncertain court challenges
if unjustly imprisoned. In response, Senator Dianne Feinstein tried to
allay these concerns with an amendment:

An authorization to use military force, a declaration of war, or any
similar authority shall not authorize the detention without charge or
trial of a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States
apprehended in the United States, unless an Act of Congress expressly
authorizes such detention.

You'd think the part about
American citizens being protected from indefinite detention would be
uncontroversial. It wasn't. But the amendment did manage to pass in the
United States Senate.

Afterward everyone forgot about it pretty quickly. But not Charlie Savage. He's a journalist at The New York Times.
If every journalist were more like him the United States government
would be far less able to radically expand the president's unchecked
authority without many people noticing.

Lawmakers charged with merging the House and Senate versions of the
National Defense Authorization Act decided on Tuesday to drop a
provision that would have explicitly barred the military from holding
American citizens and permanent residents in indefinite detention
without trial as terrorism suspects, according to Congressional staff
members familiar with the negotiations.

Says Adam Serwer, another journalist who treats these issues with the urgency that they deserve:

Of the four main negotiators on the defense bill, only one of the
Democrats, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), opposes domestic indefinite
detention of Americans. The Chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.), believes detaining Americans
without charge or trial is constitutional, and only voted for the
Feinstein amendment because he and some of his Republican colleagues in
the Senate convinced themselves through a convoluted legal rationale
that Feinstein's proposal didn't actually ban the practice. Both of the
main Republican negotiators, House Armed Services Committee Chairman
Howard "Buck" McKeon (R-Calif) and Senator John McCain (R-Ariz) believe
it's constitutional to lock up American citizens suspected of terrorism
without ever proving they're guilty.

There is a
complication, as he notes: Civil liberties groups "aren't shedding any
tears over the demise of
the Feinstein-Lee amendment," because they objected to the fact that it
protected only U.S. citizens and permanent residents, rather than all
persons present in the United States. While I respect that principled
stand, the more important thing is that this outcome puts us all at
greater risk of having a core liberty violated, and that Senators
McCain, Levin, and many other legislators suffer no consequences for
failing to protect and defend the United States Constitution.

As Serwer puts it, "The demise of the Feinstein-Lee proposal doesn't necessarily mean that
Americans suspected of terrorism in the US can be locked up forever
without a trial. But it ensures that the next time a president tries to
lock up an American citizen without trial -- as President George W. Bush previously tried -- it will be left up to the courts to decide whether or not it's legal."

Don't
let the dearth of attention fool you -- this is a scandal. Congress has
turned its back on safeguarding a core Constitutional protection and a
centuries old requirement of Western justice.

Rage, rage against the dying of the 5th.

Help Us Transmit This Story

Add to Your Blogger Account
Put it On Facebook
Tweet this post
Print it from your printer
Email and a collection of other outlets
Try even more services

Fatally Flawed: The Pursuit of Justice in a Suspicious Election

Voices of Opposition

Basic Statistics for U.S. Imperialism

New Additions

The World Reacts...

Click Picture

See Hillary Clinton Make Fun of Gaddafi's Murder

Here is Israel's Crap Treatment of an American Jew

People participate in movements when that particular movement

(1) meets their concrete and tangible needs,(2) offers individuals real experiences in the movement's outcome(3) provides a sense of community,(4) makes available ongoing education and skills training and(5) shows direct and effective ways for people to take further action.

A loose interpretation of a message sent on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 by the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy

Subscribe To

Free Trade's Race to the Bottom

A worker walks out of a factory building outfitted with nets, installed to prevent workers from jumping to their deaths, at a Foxconn factory, in Langfang, Hebei Province August 3, 2010. There have been nearly a dozen suicides at Foxconn plants around China this year alone, prompting calls for investigations into poor working conditions at the plants that make parts for customers such as Apple, HP and Dell. (REUTERS/Jason Lee) #

Portland 9/11 Truth Meetup Group and the Smell of Bacon

You can't have peacefor the sake of peace.Peace is a consequenceof an equitable arrangement.